


I Can See for Miles

by gritsinmisery



Series: Nyssa [2]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-27
Updated: 2010-01-27
Packaged: 2017-10-06 18:12:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gritsinmisery/pseuds/gritsinmisery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Master explains it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Can See for Miles

**Author's Note:**

> Happens during The-Year-That-Wasn't in _Last of the Time Lords_.
> 
> Follow-up to Blinded Me with Science. Read that first or this won't make a lick of sense.
> 
> Mad props to **x_los**, not only for beta-ing The Fic That Would Not Resolve, but for helping me plot. She's been Nyssa to my Master, but she got a bit of her own back.

I Can See for Miles  
  
One day the game was just no fun any more, and he was finished with her. 

Oh, she’d ceased to be truly useful quite some time ago; the Toclafane had their own repair shops going and there really were no other modifications they needed.  But she amused him with her devotion to the man she thought he was. More amusing still was the growing confusion and pain in her eyes as his visits grew further and further apart. He was more and more callous to her while he was with her, berating her like a child while they worked and barely speaking to her in bed.  Her main value now was merely as one more thing with which to torment the Doctor.

Even he couldn’t quite say why he ended it when he did.  Perhaps it was the last few endless weeks of waiting for his armada of rockets to be finished.  Perhaps it was the boredom that came because neither Jack nor the Doctor would respond to his goading to his satisfaction any more, and Lucy was broken beyond all entertainment value.  Perhaps he was no longer able to stomach that her steadfast devotion wasn’t truly for him.  Perhaps he grew tired of the tiny corner of his mind that held her father’s memories screaming at him as he abused her emotions and used her body for his own pleasure.

Whatever the reason, it happened.  That day he found her tentative touches -- meant to soothe a lonely, gruff lover – cloying instead of amusing.  The pain on her face as he rebuffed her was too every-day; it was time for a new, deeper despair.  As a thousand-year sadism addict, he once again needed to up his dose.  He abruptly grabbed her upper arm, swung her around so they were nose-to-nose, and started telling her the truth.  Not just an unvarnished truth, but a truth so purposely roughed up that just glancing at it would give one splinters.

First, he told her who he really was.  She denied it vehemently, aghast that he’d claim that even as some kind of odd joke.  When his expression never changed she pointed out that he’d come to her in the Doctor’s TARDIS.  Rather than give her the long, embarrassing story of Yana at Malcassairo, he simply pulled out the troublesome Tremas’ memories of her, things the Doctor would never have known: her toys, her few friends, the subjects she hated learning, the things that gave her the worst childhood nightmares, the details of the living nightmare that was her mother’s death.  As he maliciously piled one memory on top of the next, she slowly sank to her knees with her head bowed and her hands over her ears, weeping.

He dropped to a squat in front of her, the better to watch the show on her face.  He saw her go through the grief that he wasn’t her lovingly-remembered Doctor, the despair that she’d given herself over to the monster who destroyed her father and wiped her planet from the galaxy.  And ohhh, there was the flicker of disgust at the whiff of incest in their situation.  Finally, it came: the realization that if he wasn’t who she thought he was, then the project to which she’d dedicated nearly two years of her life was probably something other than what he’d claimed, also.

When she raised her tear-stained face to his to ask, he didn’t even let her get a word out before he was dragging her to her feet, out of the lab, and through the corridors of the _Valiant_.  He let the sight of the enslaved humans working on board confirm her fear that her work had not been necessary.  The glances she received in return, when any dared to look, pitied her as another victim of their overlord.  Then they burst into the conference area and he dragged her stumbling up the stairs and over to the windows on the control deck.

With a broad, sweeping gesture he showed her the planet in ruins beneath them, deforested and smoking, with shiny streaks like veins of liquid metal where the sunlight reflected off rocket yards hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles long.  In a voice loud enough for everyone in the room to hear clearly he pronounced her “Mother of the Toclafane” and proudly listed their children’s accomplishments: the millions dead, the cities and monuments lying in ruins, the forests turned to deserts, the deserts turned to glass, the mountains reduced to slag heaps for their ore, the rivers running thick and gray with sludge.  He congratulated her on creating the ultimate in destructive species, told her how close they were to unleashing their children on the universe, and laughed when she could no longer bear the sight out the window and turned away with her hands over her face.

When she looked up again into the room, it was worse.  Every servant, every guard, all the people who kept the carrier flying – they were all staring at her with hatred blazing from their eyes, rather than the pity she’d seen on her way in.  No matter how obvious it was that she had been his dupe, the crime was just too great.  The full weight of her situation hit her then.  There would be no explaining, no forgiveness, and no escape.

He watched her face eagerly; watched her go through bewilderment and into despair the way a junkie watches the plunger slide down the inside of a hypodermic.  When her shoulders slumped and all the life was gone from her eyes, he solicitously put one arm around her, pulled her head against his chest, and walked her back to her lab.  She was too emotionally drained to resist, even though she knew it would just confirm the news spreading like wildfire down the corridors ahead of them and make her crimes look worse.

In her sleeping quarters, he led her to the bed and sat her down on it.  She allowed him to lay her down, letting him move her limbs as though she was some sort of doll.  She stared, eyes unseeing, unresponsive to his words and actions, each a mockery of comfort.  He pulled a spare blanket over her and left, shutting the door to the bedroom.

He made an exhaustive search of the lab and removed every knife, scalpel, laser, or other tool that would cut or puncture – he would not give her an easy way out.  He set someone to monitor the lab cameras round-the-clock, with strictest orders to contact him the minute she moved.

When the call came, he hurried down to the old man’s cell.  His prisoner was once again bound to a chair and placed in front of the monitor, and another chair set along side.  He came in, nearly bouncing with glee, holding a fresh bag of jelly babies.

“She knows! She knows!  And everyone else knows, and ohhh, how they looked at her! You should see her eyes; she looks so lost.  Hmm, let’s see how she handles it.  Watch, now!  Jelly baby?  No?  All for me then.”  He settled into the empty chair, eyes darting back and forth between the girl in the lab on the screen and the other man.

At first she moved aimlessly between the counters and tables, fingers briefly sliding over whatever equipment was closest, thoughts turned inward rather than on what she was doing.  But soon she was rifling the cabinets and drawers, never finding whatever she was looking for, her movements growing more frenetic as time passed and her search continued.  Finally she leaned against a table -- contents of the once-pristine lab scattered about her -- and looked around hopelessly.

“Oh no, it won’t be that easy,” commented the Master to the Doctor, as if remarking on some sporting match.  “She’ll have to work much harder than that.  What do you think – will she keep going if it has to be messy, or will she choose to live with what she’s done?”  He searched his prisoner’s face eagerly, grinning at the despair that nearly matched that of the girl on the screen.

Once again she started searching, but her movements had purpose, and she stopped when she pulled a small, pressurized canister out of the third cabinet.

“Oh, ouch,” he winced, and turned to explain the scene.  “I told her the Toclafane use that only in a tight spot for self-defense, but really it’s for crowd containment.  It’s better than cyanide; usable outdoors, doesn’t need to be in an enclosed space for complete effectiveness.  She’s seen a couple of tests on lab rats, so she knows the results are ugly.  Will she do it?”  He watched the Doctor’s face in anticipation, popping another jelly baby in his mouth and chewing.

The answer was yes, and the Doctor’s eyes went wide in horror as he whispered, “Oh, Nyssa.” 

Pleased with the Doctor’s response and loathe to miss the show on the screen, the Master turned back to watch her.  When her body stopped convulsing and she lay still on the floor, he pronounced, “Thus passeth the last of the Trakenites.”  He swept one arm toward the screen as he looked back to the Doctor.  “Now _that_ was a companion.”

Despite being aged and bound, despite the tears rolling down his cheeks, the Doctor’s eyes burned as he stared at his captor.  “Why?” he demanded.  “You could have kept her, kept using her…”  His voice trailed off, rather than add the obvious “to hurt me.”

The Master stood and gestured at the screen, raising his voice in frustration.  “Her?  I didn’t want her to begin with!  She should still be treating diseases on that space station.

“She and I worked side by side, creating and caring for a new race.  I used her knowledge and her body, but I shouldn’t have needed her at all.  That should have been you and me!”  He lowered his voice, speaking intensely.  “You could share my thoughts, my life, my hearts, not just a bit of my work like she did.  I’ve been asking you for centuries to travel beside me, to live and rule the universe together, as we see fit.  But you keep running.”  Pain crept into his tone at the last, and there was a hint of bewilderment in his face.

The fire in the Doctor’s eyes died, replaced by fear of becoming just like his captor.  The Master saw that fear as just one more rejection and he struck back, wanting to share his pain.  He bent down so his gleaming eyes were level with the Doctor’s, and his voice dripped with malice as he grinned.  “She was there, she was willing, and she was oh, so very, _very_ useful.  You saw how useful.” But then his look turned hard, and he got right into the Doctor’s face.  “But she wasn’t you.”


End file.
